| Freespire Beta 1 arrives two weeks early |
Jul. 18, 2006
Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony announced on the Freespire forum website July 16 that Beta 1 of Freespire has been released -- about two weeks earlier than anticipated. Freespire, a no-cost version of the Linspire Debian-based operating system, features a KDE desktop and a 2.6.14 kernel.
"As most of you know, our plan was to release the first Beta version of Freespire (Beta 1) on August 1. I have some good news and some bad news. First, the bad news: We will not hit that date. Now, the good news: We will release BEFORE that date," Carmony wrote.
Freespire Beta 1 is available for download now, but Carmony has a request for all those who decide to try it.
"Because we're releasing Beta 1 a few weeks early, it's not as polished as it would be if we kept working on it and waited until August 1," he wrote. "We thought, however, rather than make you all wait, we'd let you all help with the beta testing sooner than later."
Let's take a couple of weeks, Carmony wrote, "and keep polishing things up and working out a few of the remaining smaller bugs, before we loudly announce to the world, 'Freespire is here! Come and get it!'"
"We can do this at Linux World in mid-August," he said. "I'd rather see all the P2P sites jammed with Freespire 1.0, not our very first beta release."
Freespire Beta 1 and Freespire 1.0 are built with a more stable, but slightly older KDE and kernel, Carmony said. "We are doing this to just get a 'concept build' out to the community," he added.
Key features, according to Linspire, include:- out-of-the-box support for MP3 and WMV
- plug-and-play support for Ati and nVIDIA cards, without user intervention
- Click-N-Run app-get service
- X.Org 6.9.0
- BitTorrent 4.4.0
- Gizmo, a free and easy-to-use Internet phone
- a large number of new network tool features and supported Windows modems
- OpenOffice.org 2.0
You can download your own copy of the 687 MB Freespire Beta 1 iso here.
OSDir has some screen shots here.
"Freespire is here! Come and get it!"
(Was that quiet enough?)
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